Open PainterExport and engine targets
Presets for Blender, Unreal, Unity and Godot, engine preview, naming and colour spaces.
On this page 6 sections
Export evaluates the texture set at full resolution and writes one image per map with the packing, naming and colour space the destination expects. Pick the engine once with the project's Target and every texture set follows; or configure each set's preset by hand.
Export Textures
- Click Export in the tool header to open the Export tab.
- Choose Contents: Textures, Target Package (textures, per-set manifests and mesh), or Evaluated Bundle.
- Choose Scope: Active Texture Set, Selected Objects' Texture Sets or All Texture Sets. Check the resolved sets and objects. An empty selection stays empty.
- Choose Destination Preset, format, bit depth, optional resolution override and padding. The view lists per-set settings and overrides.
- Choose the folder. If the project and set folders differ, explicitly select the intended destination.
- Read Output Preview: every file, size, format, bit depth, packing, color space and existing-file conflict. Export flushes pending paint changes and writes that resolved plan.
| Preset | Files and encoding |
|---|---|
| Blender | BaseColor, Roughness, Metallic, Normal, Height, AO, Emission, Opacity |
| Unreal Engine 5 | BaseColor, DirectX Normal (green inverted), ORM: R = AO, G = Roughness, B = Metallic |
| Unity Standard Metallic | BaseColor, OpenGL Normal, MetallicSmoothness: R = Metallic, G = B = 0, A = 1 − Roughness; separate Occlusion |
| Custom | One RGBA image; assign scalar channels, smoothness, zero or one to each slot independently |
BaseColor and Emission are encoded as sRGB; every other map contains linear data. Files are named {prefix}{texture_set}_{channel}{suffix}.{ext} with filesystem-safe names. Existing files are refused unless Replace Existing Files is enabled; otherwise choose a new folder, prefix or suffix. In Unreal and Unity import packed maps as linear data and normal maps with the engine's normal-map import setting.
UV padding and resolution
| UV Padding | Result |
|---|---|
| Automatic | Resolution-dependent gutters: 4 px at 512 through 64 px at 8K. |
| Custom | An explicit padding width. |
| Fill Empty Space | Extends valid surface values through the empty atlas; nearest-donor accuracy becomes coarser far from islands. |
| None | No gutter extension. |
Validity comes from export geometry, so black or transparent surface pixels are still valid. Resolution changes filter valid texels only; normals are filtered as vectors. Packed channels receive padding before packing. The view reports effective width, and export reports meeting gutters, undersized islands and overlaps. Padding cannot guarantee clean mipmaps for every atlas.
Projects saved before 0.13 adopt Automatic padding, with a notice until you choose a mode.
Safe export publication
Maps, manifests and meshes in one request are staged and published together. Replacement keeps backups until the transaction commits. A failure before commit restores prior outputs; a failure after commit retains the complete new export. A journal lets the next export recover an interrupted request. An unreadable recovery journal stops the export with an error rather than guessing.
Textures, target packages and evaluated bundles use this publication path. Resolving and exporting do not change a texture set's saved settings.
Target renderer
The Target menu at the top of the Painter view — Blender, Unreal Engine 5, Unity HDRP, Unity URP, Godot 4 or Custom — sets the export conventions of every texture set that follows it, drives Engine Preview, and turns export into one click: Export › Unreal 5. Sets with Follow Project Target turned off keep their own preset for the ordinary Export Textures button.
| Target | Tangent normal | Gloss | Packing | Naming | Mesh |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Blender | OpenGL (+Y) | roughness | separate maps | {set}_{map} | — |
| Unreal Engine 5 | DirectX (−Y) | roughness | BaseColor, Normal, ORM | T_{set}_{BC|N|ORM} | FBX, cm, Z up, −Y forward |
| Unity HDRP | OpenGL | smoothness | BaseColorMap, NormalMap, MaskMap (R = Metal, G = AO, B = Detail, A = Smooth), EmissiveColorMap | {set}_{map} | FBX |
| Unity URP | OpenGL | smoothness (Metallic alpha) | BaseMap, Normal, MetallicGlossMap, OcclusionMap, EmissionMap | {set}_{map} | FBX |
| Godot 4 | OpenGL | roughness | albedo, normal, orm, emission | {set}_{map} | glTF (.glb) |
| Custom | per set | per set | the set's own preset | the set's prefix/suffix | — |
Every target expects specular F0 = 0.04 (Principled Specular IOR Level 0.5) and applies AO to indirect light only. Export › <Target> exports the active set — or, with Selected Objects, every set assigned to the selection — with the target's packing, naming, format and resolution cap, writes a per-set <set>_manifest.json recording each file's convention, colour space and the compression the engine will typically apply (BC1/BC5/BC7), and exports the assigned objects as FBX or glTF with the target's axis and scale options. The set's saved settings are not changed by the export.
Engine Preview
The Engine Preview toggle reconfigures the display material to what the engine computes from the exported files rather than from the live float graph:
- 8-bit Textures — colour, roughness and metallic quantised to 8 bits, colour through sRGB as the file stores it.
- Normal round trip — stored as 1−G for DirectX targets and decoded back; Reconstruct Normal Z drops the blue channel and rebuilds Z from X and Y the way BC5 or Unity's normal-map import does.
- Smoothness round trip for Unity targets.
- AO Indirect Only — the directly lit viewport shows no AO, as in the engine.
- The view transform switches to Standard (Unreal's tone map is not reproduced) and is restored when the preview is turned off.
The adapters are small role-tagged nodes between the compiled graph and the Principled BSDF, so toggling never rebuilds or recompiles the material.
Production export
Production Export writes an evaluated bundle: a new scene, textures and manifest in a chosen directory with an engine profile and the same explicit replacement and transactional publication rules. Generated geometry helpers are included or omitted explicitly. Measure Density reports the active set's texel density, and Stage Atlas creates evaluated copies of the selected source props with new UVs at an explicitly chosen resolution. These actions live under Export › Prepare Export; Stage Mesh LOD creates a staged reduced mesh while preserving the source for comparison.
Reference: engine validation kit.